Law in War Isn’t as Irrelevant as People Fear

President Donald Trump’s claim last summer that the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president” was promptly—and rightly—condemned as constitutional fantasy by prominent liberals and conservatives alike. That “ours is a government of limited powers” is as foundational a constitutional principle as they come.  

Yet watching of the president’s decision making unfold, many were left wondering whether law could change the course of events. Indeed, conventional constitutional wisdom that law matters little in executive-branch decisions about the use of military force. In this telling, the Constitution is notoriously indeterminate about how exactly power over force is to be divided, and in practice, no other branch of the government stands between the president and military action anyway. Courts have avoided ruling